is there no limit to what you are willing to accept as deception though?  Suppose you were interested in buying a game and you read some made up accounts from people being paid to make the game sound good.  I think this type of practice is no good for consumers. 

I wouldn't mind receiving money for my positive and negative opinion as long as they don't demand to control my talk to much. That is what all of us do on corporate level.

About meat bot, I don't care, as long as they don't spam It's a valid way of a company to try and stir opinion to its side, and if it's based on fake info the collateral damage is a lot bigger than the gain of the spin.

We have seem how much flack companies get for their spins, meat bot wouldn't be too much different, unless for the rule here that we have to be more respectful of users than on companies, but we can deny their point fully.

Yep, bigger companies are bigger target and can lose a lot. So even though we like to hate big corporations, they are very strictly enforced on following ethics behavior.

Well let's not get too kind here :P .  They are very strictly kept away from stuff that would leave them with considerable legal exposure.  That's not the same as ethical behavior.  Basically, people who accuse Activision, Sony, Nintendo, Blizzard, or Ubi of bribing a reviewer and other reckless behavior are underestimating them considerably.  Late review embargoes, blacklisting, review boot camps, marketing deals, these are the tools of the trade among the big players who want to try to influence scores or limit their effectiveness.  They're subtle, but effective.  Bribes and review censorship are the tools of indies and smaller companies who are either that sleezy, that dumb, or part of that ignorant group who think "everyone does it" and therefore they can and should.  

Spreading paid positive/negative messages about videogames on forums like this one? Pretty shitty, but there's probably not much anyone can do about it.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac-spends-1-million-to-correct-commenters-on-reddit-and-facebook.html

"Correcting" comments who disagree with your political campaign... Yeah, that's also completely fine.

The internet is a great place. :)

I don't have a problem with that, but it's sad to see a lot of fanboys on twitter act as cheerleaders for their favorite company without getting paid.

I'm much more upset with it when it's done from a political perspective. The Clinton Campaign was openly confirmed a while back to hire shills to act as Bernie supporters and be raucous to turn undecideds away, or to mass report Sanders pages on all forms of social media to get them taken down. If it's done to help market something, that's one thing - and while I'd rather there be some form of transparency in that regard, it's not nearly as bad as immorally tweaking the public perception of political figures. 

Not getting kind. I didn't said they follow an ethical behavior because they are good guys, but because the damage could be quite big. So yes, they will push the needle in their favor while trying to avoid exposition.

In Brazil it's quite common to have MAVs (A social media guerrilla) of the left-wing creating fake accounts to put prejudice comments and very flammatory behavior and tag that as behavior from the right wing (or white, male, christian, etc).

They will also mass report all right wing pages on facebook to get them blocked. And just yesterday there was a news about facebook employees admiting that they were incentivized to put down (or obfuscate) right wing pages while favouring left wing.

I've never hear that term before.  I've always heard it called astroturfing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/microsoft-paying-youtubers-for-positive-xbox-one-coverage/1100-6417235/

Where were you for this?